Christopher Lee

Two authors are often conflated. Christopher Lee (1941-2021) was a British historian. He was best known as a BBC radio defence and foreign affairs correspondent (1976-86), in particular through reporting on the Falklands war from London in 1982. But he was also a writer with a wide range of interests, and penning 396 episodes of This Sceptred Isle single-handedly was just one aspect of a considerable output. The project incorporated extracts from Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. It began with the Romans’ occupation of Britain, and after it reached the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, three further tranches were commissioned – covering the story of Britain’s great dynastic families, the 20th century, and the British empire. It eventually concluded in 2006 (The Gardian). Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee CBE, CStJ (1922-2015), was an English actor, singer and author. With a career spanning nearly 70 years, Lee was well known for portraying villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films, a typecasting situation he always lamented. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Saruman in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and The Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014), and Count Dooku in the second and third films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002 and 2005).